Many power currents course through Verdi’s Don Carlo: love, loyalty, friendship, politics, war, religion. We can ponder which dominates. Every performance shifts the balance. The thicket of versions, whether in French as Don Carlos, or Italian – Don Carlo – as in the Royal Opera House’s current revival, adds to the sense of instability (as well as to our own inadequacy in mastering every loop of the work’s complex history). Forgetting editions and yielding to the work in the theatre, its magnificence and its cry for liberty win out.
This time Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production, designed by Bob Crowley and revived by Dan Dooner, has one ingredient that could silence all other discussion: the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, making her role debut as Elizabeth of Valois. Davidsen has turned to Verdi after a concentration on German repertoire, notably Wagner. Hers is the voice of a lifetime, still developing, still exploring. Her musicality, her ability to sing softly (she has been accused of being consistently loud, far from the case here), her gift for unleashing ever more warmth on a sustained high note, are exceptional. She acts sympathetically, though the angular progress of the libretto, a reworking of Schiller’s play, gives limited chance for characterisation: Elizabeth falls in love with Don Carlo on first sight. By her next entry, through an enforced political marriage, she has become his stepmother.
Since this is a five-hour, five-act evening, we must turn to other things. Hytner’s Spanish Golden Age staging, with a modern red-rustication spin (and high-contrast lighting design by Mark Henderson), still impresses. On first night, aspects felt sketchily rehearsed, with a tendency for stiff declamation rather than character revelation or insight. The grand chorus scenes were superbly sung, but despite the gild and gaud looked haphazard physically. Similarly the orchestra, under the baton of Bertrand de Billy, was less crisp than usual, but shone in key moments, especially the prelude to Act 3. Given the recent demands on the Royal Opera’s orchestra and chorus, with seven major openings in the final weeks of the season, we can only respect the consistent standard they achieve.
In the title role, rarely the most interesting character despite giving the opera its name, the American tenor Brian Jagde settled after an uncertain start, and proved a potent match for Davidsen. More intriguing is Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, whose challenge to Philip II over his oppression of the people of Flanders is a chilling turning point, well handled and elegantly sung by Luca Micheletti. As Philip, alone in his study, overwhelmed by depression and isolation, John Relyea was measured and convincing. Yulia Matochkina’s Eboli, thick-toned and secure, was at once sly and distraught. Three smaller roles deserve mention: two Jette Parker artists, tenor Michael Gibson (Count of Lerma) and soprano Sarah Dufresne (Voice from Heaven), and, in their house debut, soprano Ella Taylor (Tebaldo). As the audience made clear, the evening belonged to Davidsen, but as an overwhelming insight into the perils of war and leadership, it was Verdi’s.
Two shows in the Linbury theatre were the centrepiece of the fourth ROH Engender festival, which celebrates “groundbreaking work from women and non-binary opera-makers, creatives and change-makers”. Woman at Point Zero, by Bushra El-Turk, is based on a 1975 novel by the second-wave feminist Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi. Two women, Sama, a film-maker (Carla Nahadi Babelegoto), and Fatma (Dima Orsho), a sex worker imprisoned for murdering a man, discuss Fatma’s life story, from violence and abuse towards liberation.
Expertly presented by Ghent-based LOD Music Theatre, the work takes the form of a narrative. El-Turk’s music, striking and distinctive, conducted by Kanako Abe and played by Ensemble Zar, drives the emotional energy, shedding light and shade on the text’s bleakness. The whispers, crunches and urgent rhythms were part written, part improvised, for instruments including cello, accordion, Korean transverse flute, Iranian bowed kamancha and more. Stylish use of video, designed by Bissane al Charif, was effective, though the piece would also work without a staging.
History of the Present is more experimental artwork on film than opera, a rich collaboration between four women of different generations: film-maker Margaret Salmon, writer Maria Fusco, composer Annea Lockwood and singer-composer Héloïse Werner. Slowly we see clues to its subject: Belfast, where Fusco was raised in a working-class family in Ardoyne. The camera’s eye dwells on the modesty of brickwork, terrace houses, murals, street life, the peace lines, in and out of focus, shot on 35mm film. Archival sounds, rather than imagery (no soldiers, no killings), act as a meditation on trauma.
Werner improvises a response, her face revealing pain, her voice a flutter of birdsong, a growl mimicking the spinning rotors of a helicopter. Lockwood’s established skill at creating electro-acoustic soundscapes underpins this homage, sensuous and atmospheric. In a memorable sequence filmed in the Ulster Museum, a woman brushes dust off FE McWilliam’s sculpture Woman in a Bomb Blast (1974), a frozen moment of terror captured in bronze and transmuted. History of the Present was first shown in April this year at the Belfast international arts festival to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement. Don’t ask: is it opera? Just watch and listen. Next showing: Edinburgh, 11 August.
Star ratings (out of five)
Don Carlo ★★★★
Woman at Point Zero ★★★★
History of the Present ★★★★
